Abstract
This text responds to Ian Cross’ article ‘Music as Communication’ from a music therapist’s perspective. Its response is both appreciative – acknowledging the emerging consilience between aspects of music psychology and music therapy at a disciplinary level – but also contrarian, challenging whether a materialist-reductionist epistemology/methodology can form a sufficient framework for understanding how music helps within music therapy and other music and wellbeing practices. The article suggests that a broader conceptual frame of ‘musical relationship’ is substituted for the narrower one of ‘musical communication,’ and a more expansionist perspective is taken to tracing and exploring the health-promoting ecology of musical people, musical things, and musical situations.
My response to Cross’s (2014) article takes inspiration from the British comic character Vicki Pollard in the television series Little Britain. Vicki has trouble coming to a single conclusion about most matters, and usually settles on the useful Janus-faced formulation ‘Yes, but, No, but…’ Similarly, I find myself in two minds about what Cross has been saying about music and communication, although overall this contrarian response is an appreciative one. As we all know, however, some of the most fruitful conversations and collaborations begin with ‘…but…’
I speak here primarily from a practitioner perspective – as a music therapist myself, but hopefully also speaking more generally on behalf of other practice-based colleagues such as community musicians and music educators. This broad confederation of ‘people who work musically with people’ can only be appreciative of the increasing academic and research interest in the topic of music and communication, as demonstrated by Cross’s article. Music practitioners of whatever professional specialism will readily endorse an increased research focus on active musicking people, not just on the process of listening to music as a sonic object, nor only on making cognitive models of how our minds might perceive musical structure or other parameters. They will also agree that we need, further, to focus on inter-active musicking people, and lastly that ideally we need a focus on interactive musicking people in real-life situations, where they are doing things that matter with music, and doing things through music. This is all to put music back into its rightful place in social life – back into its material, social and cultural ecology.
This perspective signals a significant advance on the traditionally rather distant relationship between music psychology and music therapy – a froideur that dates from the 1970s, when music therapists couldn’t find the relevance of music psychologists’ lab-based cognitive experiments, and music psychologists despaired of the vague fluffy language of music therapists. In contrast to this, the recently emerging ‘music and health’ alignment between music practitioners, theorists and researchers (MacDonald, Kreutz, & Mitchell, 2012) seems to be establishing a ground for increased mutual understanding, and for potential interdisciplinary inquiries that could prove fruitful to both ‘pure’ and applied disciplines.
Another aspect of the ‘yes’ side of my appreciative response is in relation to Cross’s key suggestions for some of the key processes that probably underlie such real-world musical interactions. Firstly, communicative musicality (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009) has proved a convincing psychobiological platform on which musicianship and musicking are built. Secondly, being-together in musical timing, which overlaps with the process of entrainment that Cross describes, is probably key to musical communication. Thirdly, Cross’s concept of floating intentionality usefully suggests that musical meaning is flexibly co-created and re-created within local situations.
I have only one ‘but’ that comes within this ‘yes’ section, though this relates to an idea I basically agree with – that one of music’s key functions is (as Cross suggests) to manage social uncertainty. This is certainly demonstrated in many music therapy situations… but… doesn’t musicking in both therapy and everyday life situations usually do more than this? Music does more than just manage, it rather affords a condition that can create and transform personal and social situations too, something we saw clearly in this conference in the work of music therapist Felicity North (see North, 2014).
In a response that styles itself as contrarian I can’t, however, continue with too much agreement. The ‘No, but…’ area of disagreement is not, however, largely to do with the focus or content which Cross identifies as needing further inquiry (possibly jointly as music practitioners and music psychologists), but rather the core methodological ‘how dimension’ which has origins in some of the premises or pre-understandings that we music therapists and music psychologists mutually or diversely hold about musical communication and how to understand more about it.
The 19th-century wit Sidney Smith famously quipped about two women seen arguing from two windows: ‘These two ladies will never agree, for they are arguing from different premises.’ Similarly, debates between professionals and academics about what to do, and how to do it, often run into difficulty because each party is arguing from different intellectual and methodological premises. Cross’s premise (as expressed in his article, and as we’d perhaps expect from him as director of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Music & Science) is that to understand a phenomenon is to identify and isolate the ‘active ingredient’ in music or musical communication in order to reduce it, control it, test it, and thereby find its ‘underlying mechanisms.’ This strategy follows from the broader overarching scientific premises of mechanistic materialism, reductionism, and foundationalism. In this way, (pre)deciding how to explore something is necessarily coupled with judging and defining what to explore in the first place (or, perhaps even more confusingly, what the what is). Put more technically, there’s always a tendency for methodology to predetermine or trump both epistemology and ontology. As a contrarian I might characterize this as ‘jumping from premises!’
From his own starting premise, Cross formulates entities such as ‘musical communication’ and ‘communicative behaviours’ as the key phenomena that we should explore further, and which are probably at the root of how music therapy works (and can ideally be proved as working to sceptics). To be sure, Cross is addressing the central conference theme of ‘Music and Communication’ and so it is not surprising that musical communication is his focus, but his discussion represents a broader research approach. He is interested in ‘an account of music as interactive process that we can operationalize: one that enables us to produce falsifiable hypotheses that we can use to understand and test the idea and actuality of music as communication’ (Cross, 2014, p. 812).
So what’s the problem with this? It’s surely standard scientific procedure. I’d argue, however, that the phrase ‘actuality of music as communication’ has perhaps already pre-set the research agenda, based on a possibly uncritically examined premise. Remember the conclusion that the music therapist Felicity North came to in her presentation earlier in this conference: that the essence of her work wasn’t really ‘musical communication’ as such, but rather musical relationship. With this subtle shift of phrase there’s also a shift of premise – both in terms of what the phenomenon is, but also how we can best locate, identify and explore it, and even perhaps understand what its ultimate purpose is (a formulation anathema to materialist reductionists).
So I might challenge Cross: Is it really the phenomenon of ‘musical communication’ that is key? Or is this what his previously established ontological, epistemological and methodological premises has already pre-selected for scientific attention? To put this more concretely: Is what Cross understands as ‘communicative interaction’ the same as what North means by ‘musical relationship’?
An illustrative music therapy controversy
What different premise might a music therapist argue from then? This is nicely illustrated by a controversy that has been taking place between the music therapy and special education community in Australia, led by the Australian music therapist and researcher, Kat McFerran (see McFerran & Shoemark, 2013; McFerran & Stephenson, 2006, 2009; McFerran & Thompson, in press; Stephenson, 2006).
In 2006, the special education researcher Jennifer Stephenson (2006) went to press saying that music therapy is a controversial practice in special education, with no credible evidence base. Music therapist Kat McFerran publicly challenged this, and invited Stephenson to collaborate with her on a controlled study with students with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD). The resulting study (McFerran & Stephenson, 2006), and a further one (McFerran & Stephenson, 2009), compared music therapy with a control of non-musical play (using the same therapist). The results revealed ‘no clear differences between the number and duration of intentional communication acts in music therapy as compared to non-musical play with the same therapist’ (McFerran & Thompson, in press). A seemingly unfortunate result for the music therapy profession!
Yes, but… countered McFerran: Is the music therapist really working for ‘the number and duration of intentional communication acts in music therapy?’ (McFerran & Thompson, in press). She suggests rather that they set up this particular experiment because it aligns with the premises of the dominant model of special education in Australia – a behavioural modification approach based on objective skills acquisition, and one that equates quantities of communication with relationship.
McFerran pointed out that this research showed up how the different sides of the controversy were arguing from different premises. The special education researcher was looking for abstract evidence, whereas the music therapists knew from their local and engaged experience that music and music therapy offers something more complex and unique to these students and their needs – even if this was not a case of ‘frequency of communicative acts.’
Pursuing this idea, McFerran and colleagues took a different research tack, going back to the original data and doing an exhaustive qualitative video analysis with the help of experts in early infant communication at the Royal Children’s Hospital. These people provided diverse professional perspectives including speech and language therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and a perspective from two experienced music therapists in the PMLD client area. This study came to a rather different conclusion: that music therapy ‘does create engaging conditions that motivate interaction in relationship’ (McFerran & Thompson, in press). Something else was happening in and around the more obvious musical communication: emotion, quality of engagement, and a sense of mutuality and intersubjectivity. They concluded that what was needed was a more nuanced understanding of what’s happening in music therapy in relation to the concept of ‘communication’ – one that can discriminate between the quality of communication and the quantity of measurable communicative behaviours.
North came to similar conclusions through a different route – comparing and contrasting her own aims and goals as a music therapist and as a speech and language therapist. She suggested that music therapy can achieve something that goes beyond communication as minimally defined; it’s rather about creative musical contact, togetherness, relationship, mutuality, meeting, and recognition of personhood, which North summarizes in the single profoundly humanistic and spiritual word ‘communion.’ ‘With David and Brian’ (two clients shown in her presentation) states North, ‘I think I learnt the value of just “being together” in music; the value of moments of intense aliveness and communion’ (North, 2014, p. 790).
You could argue that this is simply an alternative language, that ‘communion’ has been substituted for ‘communication’ (two words which after all share the same linguistic root). But these music therapists surely mean more than this in advocating a distinction between an expansive humanistic everyday description and a scientific and reductive one. They want to re-locate the phenomenon in a wider field, where ‘relationship’ means more than communication. The philosopher Mary Midgley (2014) makes the analogy of naming ‘the River Thames’ and describing the atomic units of its constituent water. Neither description is naturally superior, but she writes how ‘. . . things go wrong when people concentrate on atomic units without considering the wholes they belong to’ (p. 30). Describing the trajectory of music therapy work as towards relationship is to locate the work within a wider whole that is humanistic, non-material, and qualitative.
Out of our heads
These examples serve to remind us that a risk with any research on complex human phenomena is that we are tempted to study what we can study, not what we should study; we study, that is, the aspects of things that match our pre-set premises and preferred methods rather than the complex realities of the phenomena in front of us. The challenge is therefore one of ecological adequacy and validity – making sure that we don’t distort a phenomenon in the process of exploring and explaining it (Ansdell & Pavlicevic, 2010; DeNora, 2013). A way, I suggest, of minimizing this risk as music psychologists and music therapists is to take an explicitly ecological perspective to theory and research seriously. Such a perspective is increasingly being articulated within music psychology, music sociology, philosophy, and music therapy (Ansdell, 2014; Bortoft, 2012; Clarke, 2005, 2011; DeNora, 2011a, 2011b, 2013; Midgley, 2014; Noë, 2010; Small, 1998; Stige, Ansdell, Elefant, & Pavlicevic, 2010; Windsor, 2012). Put simply, this entails coming out of heads and into the world, studying the dynamic relationships between people, music, and musical worlds in all their messy complexity. From this premise, music is unlikely to be just about communication, nor is music therapy – even if musical communication is often a tool, or means to getting somewhere else. The purpose of music and music therapy is to establish and develop a complex interdependent set of ecological relationships: between sounds and people, people and people, sounds /people and places… and so on. This understanding was perhaps most clearly articulated by Christopher Small’s (1998) musicking model, based in turn on Gregory Bateson’s (1985) ecological theory.
What would musical communication be if we took it fully out of heads, and into the world? I suggest we probably need a more ‘expansionist approach’ to understanding and researching this phenomenon, not just a reductionist one. I’ve made up the word ‘expansionist’ in this sense, using it to prompt thinking about how best to approach a complex phenomenon such as ‘music-people-wellbeing’, following and describing how the phenomenon naturally ‘expands’ within its ecology, and making creative concatenations of musical people, musical things, and musical situations (Ansdell, 2014). I suggest, that is, that we also proceed – in practice, theory, and research – cautiously and imaginatively from this expansive whole that is ‘musical wellbeing’, and not just from the additive piecing together of its assumed functional parts that reductionism favours.
Let me leave you with some music and words from a music therapy client and research participant I worked with – a woman who actively asked me to quote her account of music therapy to anyone who would listen and try to understand what happens in music therapy (‘especially psychiatrists’ she added). Pam was the centre of a qualitative process study (Ansdell, Davidson, Magee, Meehan, & Procter, 2010) that came to a similar conclusion to that I’ve arrived at through this response: that what helps in music therapy is a particular quality of musical relationship understood in terms of the broader musical ecology of a musical life. The excerpt included here illustrates a rapidly developing vocal dialogue between client and therapist. Despite Pam’s beginning the excerpt in an uncomfortable manic mood state, the musical dialogue allows her to free, and then ground herself, within a very short time frame. The question I asked the audience about this excerpt was: In what way is it, and is it not, about something called ‘musical communication’?
When Pam was later asked why she kept coming back to music therapy sessions, she said: Because I thoroughly enjoy it! I can express myself, I can get up to those high notes . . . and I love music . . . I used to play the guitar . . . but when I was ill I smashed my guitar to pieces . . . but you brought out my music again . . . playing the percussion instruments, singing . . . When I first came in to hospital I’d lost my voice completely, all I could do was whistle . . . I love singing with the choir too…
When asked how she feels after the music therapy sessions, she said: It’s a good feeling . . . a spiritual feeling . . . it helps me to concentrate on something, not to hear silly voices in my head that don’t belong to me. It also helps relax me, and give me an incentive to come here. It’s so enjoyable!
As in this example, the concept of ‘musical communication’ is a necessary though not sufficient concept for how music therapy works. Rather, music helps – in music therapy and other professional musical practices, as well as in everyday life – by engaging with our lives as irreducible wholes.
Footnotes
Author note
This article is a written version of a loosely-scripted response to Ian Cross’ article ‘Music as Communication’, presented at the Nordoff Robbins Plus Conference, Music and Communication. I preserve the spoken style here, adding references only where other scholarly material is directly used.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.